The simplest to fix, but most frustrating to stumble over, was utilizing Feathers Authentication when serving views via Feathers. By default, the authentication in Feathers utilizes a JSON Web Token for capturing the current authentication status of a request. When using the OAuth2 authentication mechanism, it is possible to tell Feathers to set a cookie with the JSON Web Token.

Then, when adding authorization in front of a Feathers service, it’s as simple as adding a hook:

{
  before: {
    all: [
      authentication.hooks.authenticate(['jwt']),
    ],
  },
  after: {
  },
  error: {
  },
};

Unfortunately even with that cookie set, a browser accessing the service, this results in “Not Authentication” errors.

After a bit of searching around I eventually discovered some references to what I thought might solve my problem on this page titled: FeathersJS Auth Recipe: Authenticating Express middleware (SSR).

By default, though the OAuth2 authentication module for Feathers will set a cookie, it doesn’t appear to do anything by default to read that same cookie. One must install and use the cookie-parser package.

$ npm install --save cookie-parser

Once the cookie-parser package has been installed, it’s important that it gets added as the first middleware in the application.

const cookieParser = require('cookie-parser');
/*
 * Add the cookie parser to GET routes
 */
app.get('*', cookieParser());
/*
 * Add the cookie parser to POST routes
 */
app.post('*', cookieParser());

With this package installed and configured, the JWT cookie will be parsed properly when for requests coming in to the application. This ensures that the authentication.hooks.authenticate(['jwt']) hook has the appropriate material it needs to perform the authentication.